Talk:How to Induce Sleep Paralysis/@comment-174.57.113.108-20140330154024
I am very interested in trying this. Nothing like this ever happens to me anymore but it USED to when I was a kid. I can remember dozens of such experiences between the ages of 5 and 10. I did nothing to cause them and since I was a kid I know I was not sleep deprived or stressed out, and I never did the exercises I've seen here where you lay there waiting for something to happen, or like on another site where you set an alarm and get up before going back to sleep. In my experience sleep paralysis always happened at the END of a nightmare. I dream would suddenly turn scary or sinister in some way, or maybe I just THOUGHT something bad was about to happen and I would panic and want to "get out of there." I wouldn't exactly know I was sleeping, but usually "getting out of there" meant not running away but trying to snap out of the dream, a quick movement to wake myself up. At that moment the paralysis began (or perhaps you would say I would simply become aware of the paralysis I was previously unaware of). I almost never was able to react in time because whenever it happened it seemed there were a couple seconds where suddenly I become weak and helpless, feel my body get heavy, like it is numb and tingly and sinking into the bed or being forced down or pulled into the bed by an invisible force. If I could not wake up before this "vortex" had me in its clutches, I was doomed to experience the full brunt of the terror. A buzzing sound would begin and I would be unable to breathe or move or scream out for help. I literally thought I was dying and WOULD die if I could not wake up in time, so I fought it tooth and nail, which I hear people saying is what makes it worse. Unlike the experience of others, I could never open my eyes - trying to unglue them to wake up was part of the struggle. Sheer effort is what finally allowed me to conquer them, or at least believe I did, because they no longer happen. What has changed in me that the do not? For some reason I remember they were scarier when I was on my back - my heart pounded harder, the buzzing was louder, more high pitched and "evil," the experience was harder to escape from and lasted longer and was much more scary - I felt so much more helpless and terrified that I would NEVER fall asleep on my back. When on my stomach the experience and terror seemed more gentle and muted, a softer buzzing, the tingles were not as intense and I would feel strange waves of a thick heavy substance moving down my back. I felt I was able to end these more quickly by pushing up with my arms, rather than trying to sit up from laying on my back. Perhaps I felt more vulnerable to attack with my stomach and neck exposed lying on my back? Anyway, given this history, it seems like i shoud be able to experience this again, right? But I've read there are two kinds of sleep paralysis: hypnapompic and hypnagogic. Since mine was hypnapompic (while waking up) and what you are describing is hypnagogic (while falling asleep) could that be the main difference?